...Whether damning Trump for ignorance about Vladimir Putin, ridiculing Trump’s idea to ban Muslims coming into the United States or disparaginghis other goofy ideas and lack of presidential temperament, Christie made clear that Trump was unfit to be commander in chief. Christie posed as the serious grown-up in this race on national security. That was the essence of his case to the American people.

In fact, after months and months of careful coaching by outside foreign policy experts, his initial gaffes (e.g. “occupied territories” was how he referred to the West Bank) stopped and he became proficient on national security. One former adviser told me he “absolutely” would never have helped Christie had he known he would endorse Trump. He said of Christie’s endorsement, “It’s an absolute disgrace.” It is exactly that, because Christie knows better.

Donald Trump wants to “open up” American libel laws to make it easier for politicians such as himself to sue newspapers that write things of which he disapproves. The problem faced by Trump — and by his pal Harry Reid, who wants to use federal law to censor political speech — is that the First Amendment severely limits what men who dream of shutting down newspapers (and little magazines) can actually do.

What does “opening up” mean in this context?

I spent most of my career as a newspaper editor, and blustering imbeciles like Donald Trump threatened to sue me about once a week or so. I never lost a case. I never even saw one get all the way to the courtroom, for that matter. That’s because, as with Rosemary Lehmberg’s persecution of Republican politicians in Texas, the point of libel suits — including the one National Review currently is fighting with global-warming clown Michael Mann — isn’t to win the case. The point is to harass you, to consume your time, energy, and money in dealing with the case. You might win the suit, you might never see the inside of a courtroom, but it still costs you $800 every time you pick up the phone with your lawyer. That’s why people sue, nine times out of ten: pure harassment. American libel law is organized around a three-part test. For a claim to be libelous, it must be 1) false; 2) defamatory; 3) published with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth. All of these give Plaintiff Trump some problems.

Because a claim must be false to be libelous, truth is an absolute defense against libel. So, for instance, if I write that Donald Trump is a blazing jackass who has driven his companies into bankruptcy four times, mainly because he doesn’t know how to handle debt, Trump can’t do anything about that, because it is true. If I write that Trump is poorly positioned to take on Wall Street because he owes practically every bank on the street enormous sums of money, I’m golden, because it is true. If I write that Donald J. Trump is a lowlife who has cheated on his wives and betrayed his own family and the families of others through his remarkable personal commitment to adultery, Trump has no recourse, because this is true. If I write that the fact that Melania Trump was a client of Trump’s dopey little modeling agency strikes me as creepy indeed — I advocate the separation of sex and payroll — I’m on solid ground, because the facts of the case are not in dispute. If I write that you credulous yokels who believe that Trump is self-funding his presidential campaign have fallen for an obvious lie, I am protected by the fact that this is documented truth...

Saturday, February 27, 2016

A motion put forth by McGill University students who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has failed.

Students had initially voted earlier this week in favour of the motion to boycott Israel, which was put forth by a group called the McGill BDS Action Network.

But the initial vote then had to be ratified. In the online ratification process, 57 per cent (or 2,819 people) voted against while 43 per cent (2,119 people) voted in favour.

The university had declined to comment on the vote until the ratification process was complete. In a statement published to McGill's website, Principal and Vice-Chancellor Suzanne Fortier explained why the university's administration "steadfastly" opposes the BDS movement.

Friday, February 26, 2016

An open letter from Robert Lantos, Canada's most prominent film producer and the driving force behind hit movies such as Eastern Promises and Barney's Version:Dear Dr. Shoukri,

I have observed over the years the transformation of York
University from an academic institution into an incubator of hate and violence
against the Jewish people. The disgraceful intimidation of Jewish students on
your campus, coupled with the relentless defamation of Israel and your
indifference to it all, have no place in a peace loving, liberal democracy like
ours.

Under your watch, the university has lost its way as a place of
learning, tolerance and diversity. You have taken shameful refuge behind legal
cover and invoked neutrality in the anti Semitic mural controversy, which
itself is symptomatic of the overall toxic environment on your campus. You stay
on the sidelines rather than use the power of your office to stand up to the
storm troopers who turn your institution into a podium for the incitement to
violence against the Jewish people. In my film Sunshine, there is a character
who, after the genocide of Hungary's Jewish population, asks an eyewitness,
"How could you just let it happen?" A bystander with the power to
intervene who chooses to do nothing ceases to be a bystander. He becomes
indistinguishable from the perpetrator. If you are not part of the solution Dr.
Shoukri, you become part of the problem.

I urge you, in your capacity as President of York, to take
immediate and concrete action to remove the offensive mural as the first step
toward restoring an atmosphere of peace and respect on your campus. Sweep Jew
hatred to the gutter, where it belongs.

Remember when the nuclear deal with Iran had a chance tostrengthen the country's moderates? Jeb Bush was the Republican presidential front-runner. Fetty Wap ruled the charts. Serena Williams nearly won the Grand Slam of Women's Tennis. 2015. What a year.

You don't really hear this line any more from President Barack Obama. To understand why, consider Friday's elections in Iran. In theory, Iranians will be choosing members of their parliament and the Assembly of Experts, a panel of Islamic scholars who will choose the country's next supreme leader, who controls Iran's foreign policy and nuclear program.

With most sanctions lifted, the nuclear deal is popular in Iran. So this should be a golden opportunity for Iran's relatively moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, to consolidate his power. But this is Iran.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

The recent passage of Conservative MP Tony Clement's motion to condemn the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) effort against Israel highlighted something one rarely sees lately in Canada's Parliament; the ability of Canada's two mainstream political parties to agree on a sensible proposal. However, it also brought to light some serious misconceptions about the nature of anti-Israel activism.

The motion got the support of the Opposition Conservatives and with the exception of three insignificant backbenchers, backing from the governing Liberal party, while it was opposed by the far-left NDP and the parochial, leftist Bloc Quebecois.

For many on the Liberal Party benches, condemnation of the movement that seeks to deligitimize and ultimately destroy the middle east's only liberal democracy came with mixed feelings. That inner conflict was most pronounced in the words of Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion. While supporting the motion, Dion expressed anxiety about its ramifications and an ill-informed understanding about the motives of people in the anti-Israel movement when he said:

...it cannot be denied that many of the boycott supporters are mistaken in good faith. Many organizations and individuals in Canada and abroad support the BDS movement out of the belief that it will somehow accelerate the peace process and be a non-violent initiative that leads to a lasting resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their goal ultimately is the same as ours: a two-state solution with a secure, stable, and democratic Israel, living side-by-side with a secure, stable, and democratic Palestinian state. However, they are mistaken in the way this goal may be achieved.

We will not convince the people acting in good faith that they are mistaken by hitting them over the head and condemning them at every turn. Intimidation, name-calling, and accusations will not lead to constructive dialogue with them. We must talk to them with respect and explain why boycotting Israel is a false solution.

We have had this debate and many others, and we will continue to have it, in Canada and elsewhere, with people we respect, who in some cases are themselves Jewish. Dialogue and honest and firm debate, not ostracism and intimidation, will rally support for truly promising solutions...

Stephane Dion himself may be a reasonable, good-willed individual, but he errs considerably when he projects those attributes onto members of a movement comprised mainly of depraved, sadistic liars.

In fact, sadism is an operative feature of anti-Israel fanatics in the BDS movement.

BDSM (Bondage, Domination and Sadomasochism), the lifestyle by which people derive thrills from inflicting and receiving physical pain and verbal abuse, and BDS, the movement that seeks to replicate much of the totalitarianism and anti-Jewish sadism of Nazi Germany, share more than an identical sequence of initials.

The BDS mob are, in a way, so many Jian Ghomeshis, who try to make a public show of being proponents of "social justice," but their veneer is even more transparent than that of the disgraced former CBC radio host. BDS activists get a near-sexual form of arousal from inflicting harm on the Jewish right to a homeland. Like Ghomeshi, at their core, BDS is sadistic and narcissistic.

On their website, they actually claim that their effort to cripple Israel is not "anti-Israel." They are so lacking in rationality it transcends mere lack of self-awareness and goes deep into the realm of pathology.

Lies are an integral part of BDS, as much as it was with Nazi Germany and Hitler's Big Lie. It is a movement that tries to promulgate the lie about Israel practicing "apartheid," when in fact Arabs in Israel have full enfranchisement rights, free speech rights, women's equality rights, and full

legislative representation. Indeed, Arabs have more rights in Israel than they do in any Arab country. They lie that Israel is committing "genocide" while the Palestinian population under Israeli control has more than quadrupled since 1948. One of the most obvious lies of the BDS movement is that they are "pro-Palestinian." If that was the case, then they would condemn the abusive treatment and denial of rights that Palestinians receive in Lebanon, and other Arab countries, and for the gross abuses of human rights that Palestinian governments of Hamas in Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank inflict on their own citizens. But BDS activists remain silent about that because Palestinian rights are not their actual objective.

BDS proponents usually revert to the lie that they are merely critics of Israel and that condemnation of them equates denying them free speech.

One would have to have the sort of mental defect typical to a BDS activist to think that condemning someone is the same thing as preventing them from speaking.

As to they being critical of Israel, members of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement are "critical" of Israel like Paul Bernardo and Robert Pickton are "critical" of women's rights.

There probably aren't a lot of people who consider themselves sexual sadists who have actually read anything by The Marquis de Sade. BDSM as a "lifestyle" didn't gain any sort of popularity until the mid 20th Century. But without knowledge of its basis, it's impossible to understand the phenomenon any more than you can really understand Christianity without reading the Bible.

De Sade, despite being an aristocrat, during the French Revolution reinvented himself as "Citizen de Sade" and became a far-left politician. Besides his sexual deviance, de Sade could, in a way, be considered a Social Darwinist a generation before Darwin was born. Sadism was borne out of de Sade's depiction of sexual torture in his novels, and he frequently took his fetishes out of the realm of fantasy into genuine action. The philosophy of de Sade isn't stupid, but it is completely amoral, and in practice, unspeakably wicked. To boil it down to its most simplistic base, it amounts to the idea that "if they were not meant to be sheared, then God would not have made them sheep." Take the mention of God out of that, as De Sade was an atheist, and you have an ideology that allows for abusing and harming anyone you can in any way you like, if you think you can do it with impunity. It is the ultimate form of narcissism.

The popularity of the soft-core porn novel 50 Shades of Grey indisputably insinuated sadomasochism into the cultural mainstream. But that doesn't make the practices it celebrates psychologically healthy any more than it makes the drearily-written book's many fans anything more than appalling arbiters of literature.

If you become sexually aroused from inflicting physical pain on another person, then there's something seriously wrong with you.

The only thing that prevents a real sadist from subjugating and torturing at will is the threat of punishment from an even more powerful authority.

It follows to reason that such people should be given no authority or respect whatsoever, since they see any power as an opportunity to inflict harm on others.

Both BDSM and BDS are at their core heavily influenced by the sadistic political ideology of Nazism. BDSM mimics the Nazi system of placing extensive energy into experimenting with new forms of torture and abuse, while the BDS sadomasochists copy the Nazi system of persecuting and boycotting Jews.

BDS is one of the biggest threats to free speech since Nazism. Ironically complaining about their free speech being threatened when it is not, BDS activists are engaged in a real effort to deprive free speech rights to Canadian supporters of Israel and to Israelis. The BDS boycotts are not only their own refusal to listen to any Israeli or pro-Israel speaker. It is an effort to prevent anyone else from being able to hear an opinion that contradicts theirs.

Like other forms of fascism, the BDS movement is dedicated to shutting down any speech they don't like. They claim to be victims of censorship when they are criticised and condemned, while they actually engage in Nazi-like acts of violence and thuggery to stop pro-Israeli speech on campuses.

On the other side of the BDS and BDSM similarity is that both movements rely on the sick need for abuse felt by masochists.

In the BDS movement, those masochists take the form of groups that would be severely persecuted in Palestine, yet they feel they need to make a display of siding with people who would gladly abuse them in the most horrific ways.

One such group is a collection of unbalanced, pathetic Jews calling themselves Independent Jewish Voices. For the most part, their "Jewishness" is confined to a form of Munchausen Syndrome by which they can get attention for themselves by being Jews who publicly despise Jewish self-determination.

To get an idea of what such people are like, make what you will of the mental state of a spokesperson for Independent Jewish Voices who claims that the bulk of Jews in Canada supported the Conservative Party because they want to "reap the rewards of white supremacy" and maintain their "place in the racial order."

Even more masochistic and bizarre than the pathetic wretches of Independent Jewish Voices are those gay groups that seek Israel's destruction. Israel is the most gay-friendly country in the middle east. It has two Pride Parades, recognizes gay marriage and full equal rights for its gay citizens.

Yet there are groups, like the now-disbanded Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, that's sole function was to harm Israel, while supporting the people who would actually torture them if given the opportunity.

The rationale that guides these Hamasochists is almost beyond comprehension.

The BDS movement is not bred of misinformed goodwill. It is not deserving of respect. It is a form of irrational depravity which cannot respond to reason, and needs to be treated as such.

The Liberal government has introduced new legislation to remove barriers to citizenship erected by its Conservatives predecessors while retaining and extending officials’ authority to deal with fraud.

The changes, expected to be implemented this year, will provide greater flexibility for applicants trying to meet the requirements for citizenship and help immigrants become full-fledged Canadian citizens sooner, said Immigration Minister John McCallum.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

If bad taste is a crime, then I think I should have the right to exercise some vigilante justice on the fucking Birkenstock set.

If this guy is facing a tribunal, it should be for his stupid hairdo, and not his bad jokes

Montreal comedian Mike Ward testified at a human rights tribunal hearing today, saying he didn't think a joke about a young man with a condition that causes facial disfigurement crossed a line.

More than a dozen comedians turned out to show their support for Ward, who is the subject of a 2012 complaint to the Quebec tribunal after Ward ridiculed Jérémy Gabriel in his comedy show, Mike Ward s'eXpose.

In Melissa Click’s view, one of her worst moments happened to be caught on video and seen by millions of people.

Ms. Click, a University of Missouri communications professor, was taking part in a student protest over racial issues in November when she grabbed at a student journalist’s camera and enlisted other activists to help her with a call that ricocheted across social media: “I need some muscle over here!”

She has since apologized, and she has since been suspended by the university. Ms. Click has heeded advice to remain silent on social media and decline interview requests even as she was excoriated for what was viewed as an outrageous display by a member of academia.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Long before General William Donovan recruited spies to advance the American war efforts during World War II as Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the CIA, General George Washington mastered the art of intelligence as Commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

I'm quite fond of Nigel Farage, and he's still a formidable orator. But Farage's decision to welcome and feature the detestable pig, terror-supporter George Galloway as part of his anti-EU movement, shows a potentially serious lapse of judgement.

Thursday, February 18, 2016

When it comes to expenses reports, Shelley Carroll is one of city council’s big spenders- the representative of Ward 33 has little respect for Toronto taxpayers, consistently spending more than average. In November 2010, this website covered her outrageous expenses for building a website created by a militant labour allied company who didn’t even deliver the service on time.

But what should we expect from a member of the Toronto Police Services Board who hired an unrepentant ex-convict who directed protesters to smash windows during the 2010 G20? Or the city councillor who encouraged the complainants in the Gregory Alan Elliott case to “cyber bully” just a few weeks before they started spreading around rumours and misleading the police to believe he was a paedophile? Or a counsellor who runs away when a citizen asks her a hard question in city hall?

The Jew-haters in Labour must have thought they had an open license after Jeremy Corbyn was elected party leader. If it weren't for Alex Chalmers exposing and publicly shaming the ones at Oxford, they would probably still be at it.

Kang Lee is one of the University of Toronto's brilliant researchers and by several orders of magnitude is the best thing OISE has going for it. (Fortunately his research offices are in a seperate building from the main OISE campus.) His area of research is about how and why children lie, including the variances lying among different cultures.

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Washington (CNN)Ted Cruz has inched ahead of Donald Trump in a new national poll released Wednesday, the first national poll of the 2016 cycle that shows the Texas senator on top of the Republican field.

Cruz has the backing of 28% of Republican voters nationwide, unseating Trump, who won the support of 26% in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Toronto City Councilor Shelley Caroll is asked why, during a homeless crisis where the city doesn't have enough shelter space for people forced to live outdoors in the brutal cold of February, the city manages to find millions to house Syrian refugees.

As Russian planes decimate Aleppo, and hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria’s largest city prepare for encirclement, blockade and siege — and for the starvation and the barbarity that will inevitably follow — it is time to proclaim the moral bankruptcy of American and Western policy in Syria.

Actually, it is past time. The moral bankruptcy has been long in the making: five years of empty declarations that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go, of halfhearted arming of rebel groups, of allowing the red line on chemical weapons to be crossed and of failing adequately to share Europe’s refugee burden as it buckles under the strain of the consequences of Western inaction. In the meantime, a quarter-million Syrians have died, 7 million have been displaced and nearly 5 million are refugees. Two million of the refugees are children.

This downward path leads to the truly incredible possibility that as the Syrian dictator and his ruthless backers close in on Aleppo, the government of the United States, in the name of the struggle against the Islamic State, will simply stand by while Russia, Assad and Iran destroy their opponents at whatever human cost.

Now with transgenderism and the rather preposterous lemming-stampede to look progressive by trying to turn a psychiatric condition into an identity choice is going to work out badly for many people involved.

There are some wonderful transgendered people in the world. No transgendered person should be deprived of the rights that every other citizen enjoys, any more than a person with autism, or bipolar disorder should be deprived of theirs.

But the fact remains that from a biological standpoint, surgery can't change a person from one sex to another. I'm more than happy to use female pronouns when referring to Caitlin Jenner as a matter of courtesy. But do I really, truly believe she is a woman? No.

There are some people who really no need to live life in a different sex than they were born. It takes a lot of courage and determination to make that choice, and for those who do, or at least the good people who do, I wish them all the best.

But children are in no position to understand the full ramifications of such a decision, nor are they fully able to assess themselves in that context. So when you hear about "transsexual children," and psychiatrists prescribing prepubescent kids hormone-blockers, you're seeing a form of child abuse by medical practitioners and these childrens' parents, many of whom clearly are manifesting a form of Munchausen Syndrome-by-proxy.

From The Globe and Mail:

After the controversial closing of its world-famous gender identity clinic, and the dismissal of Dr. Ken Zucker, its internationally renowned director, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has acknowledged to The Globe and Mail that a damaging account of an alleged exchange between a patient and Dr. Zucker was false.

An external review that reported the details of the incident and led to the clinic’s closing has been pulled from the centre’s website.

In an update added Friday evening to the site, CAMH now says, “We have been advised that [the review] includes an erroneous statement. CAMH was recently made aware that an individual who participated in the review process had mistakenly attributed comments to Dr. Ken Zucker which were not made by him.”

The new paragraph concludes, “We regret that this statement was included in the report and apologize for the error.”

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

“I ought to be the darling of the criminal defense bar,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once said. “I have defended criminal defendants’ rights—because they’re there in the original Constitution—to a greater degree than most judges have.”Many criminal defense lawyers might gag at the thought. After all, Scalia was the most vociferous defender of the death penalty, even pushing (in losing causes) for its application to minors and the mildly mentally retarded. He wrote the majority opinion that upheld a grotesquely disproportionate drug mandatory minimum sentence from an Eighth Amendment challenge.

Yet Scalia was not delusional. He believed his opinions in those cases were well grounded in the text of the Constitution. After all, capital punishment is mentioned specifically in the Constitution and thus cannot now be considered unconstitutional As for mandatory sentences, the use of prison, even for lengthy terms, would not have struck the Framers as both “cruel” and “unusual,” as the Eighth Amendment required. Thus, Scalia’s originalist approach led to unhappy results for criminal defendants in these cases.

Yet other Scalia opinions, also rooted in “the original Constitution,” favored criminal defendants and were cheered by the defense bar. Indeed, in many cases Scalia sounded like a full-throated civil libertarian. Most famously, Scalia voted to protect American flag-burning protestors from criminal punishment, even though, he later admitted, he had no love for the “scruffy, bearded, sandal-wearing people” who did such things.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Outrageous is an overused word in politics, but this is truly outrageous.

Former Sun Media columnist and Sun News Network host Ezra Levant’s new online news site, The Rebel (therebel.media), has become one of Albertans’ top Internet sources of reporting and commentary in just its first year in operation.

So how come Rachel Notley’s NDP government is doing its best to censor Levant and his reporters?

If I hadn’t read for myself the letters back and forth between the Rebel’s lawyer and the government, I wouldn’t have believed even the NDP were capable of such anti-free speech behaviour.

Back in late January when it was announcing the results of its royalty review, the NDP held a closed-door technical briefing (a “lock-up”) where government experts explained the details to journalists.

When Rebel contributor Sheila Gunn Reid showed up for the briefing, she was turned away. The event was for “accredited media only.”

Now Reid never went to journalism school. (Neither did I.) And she has never worked in a formal newsroom. But she used to be part of the Corus radio network’s Hockey Moms panel that regularly debated government involvement in family issues and her new book was the #1 bestseller on Amazon.ca most of last week. It’s now sold out.

If that doesn’t make Reid a journalist, I’m not sure what does.

The NDP government doesn’t question the legitimacy (nor should it) of online lefty journalists such as David Climenhaga of the NDP-friendly rabble.ca or Dave Cournoyer, a communications advisor for the United Nurses of Alberta, whose daveberta.ca blog is a must-read on Edmonton and Alberta politics.

So why single out Reid?

It couldn’t be, could it, that Reid’s bestseller is entitled The Destroyers: Rachel Notley and the NDP's War on Alberta, or that Reid and her boss (Levant) were among the first journalists to out the radical, out-of-province pasts of many senior political staffers in the NDP government?

It was a cri de coeur for the sanctity of law. And it was also for herself, feminist.

A cry from the heart of a brilliant legal mind, reducing even Jian Ghomeshi — defendant — to reverent spectator, a bystander at court.

After almost two weeks of grotesque caricature, targeted by hateful vitriol as a traitor to her sex, a Valkyrie in stiletto heels — on incendiary social media, in mainstream commentary by harridans of gender identity polemics — defence lawyer Marie Henein brought it home: There is no refuge in court for dishonesty, no amnesty for colluders in either fact or fiction.

No double-X chromosome pass just because the complainants are females who may have been done terribly wrong by Ghomeshi, on trial for sexual assault times four and overcoming resistance by choking.

Outside Courtroom 125, the gospels of female victimhood had become the subtext — indeed the overarching theme — attempting to discount what was transpiring inside, because that wasn’t going well at all. But it was never about all the many victims out there who haven’t been believed in the past, won’t be believed in the future. It was about these three women, now...

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Scientists announced Thursday that, after decades of effort, they have succeeded in detecting gravitational waves from the violent merging of two black holes in deep space. The detection was hailed as a triumph for a controversial, exquisitely crafted, billion-dollar physics experiment and as confirmation of a key prediction of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

James Woods has defied skeptics and gotten past an initial First Amendment hurdle in his provocative defamation lawsuit against an anonymous Twitter user who suggested he was a "cocaine addict."

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mel Recana has reviewed Woods' complaint against a "John Doe," as well as the defendant's motion to strike, and has decided to let the case proceed. As a result, despite Twitter's own resistance to discovery demands in this case, Woods will likely be given the green light to unmask the user known as "Abe List," whose social media profile identified him as a Harvard-educated partner at an L.A.-based private equity firm.

Lawmakers in both chambers of Congress are slated to introduce bipartisan legislation boosting efforts at the state and local levels to combat economic warfare against Israel, according to versions of the bills obtained exclusively by Tablet.

The bipartisan bills—sponsored by Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) in the Senate, and Juan Vargas (D-CA) and Bob Dold (R-IL) in the House—are slated to be introduced on Wednesday under the title “Combating BDS Act of 2016.” Among other things, they protect state and local governments’ right to disassociate pensions and contracts from entities that boycott, divest from, or sanction Israel.

This legislative move comes after a string of local victories against BDS. Last June, South Carolina passed a law prohibiting public entities in the state from signing contracts with business that boycott Israel. A little over a month later, Illinois passeda different law, requiring state pensions to terminate investment in companies that adhere to the BDS agenda.

An activist involved in state-by-state efforts to combat anti-Israel boycotts said he expects states pursuing measures modeled on the South Carolina and Illinois laws to reach double digits by summer. Similar bills have already been introduced in Ohio and California, with momentum in New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania, as well...

There is a strong tradition in this country of supporting justice and human rights. But there is also a rich Canadian history of standing fast against brutality and oppression. The Liberals appear to believe there is a contradiction between the two seams.

The Trudeau government said Monday it will withdraw from a combat role in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, in favour of what reads like a recovery plan. It’s the equivalent of the Americans introducing the Marshall reconstruction plan in Europe in 1943 – two years before the Second World War was won.

Every minister who veered near a microphone Monday touted a Pentagon statement about Canada “stepping up” its efforts — tripling its training commitment, doubling its intelligence-gathering capacity and increasing humanitarian aid.

Because the slimy Liberals think wouldn't be fair to disenfranchise people who don't understand a fucking word of what's going on around them, but will vote for the Liberals because they let them in.

Immigration Minister John McCallum says the government will be “producing radical changes” to the Citizenship Act in the next few weeks. Liberals have been telling him that the government should eliminate the language requirement for new immigrants to apply for Canadian citizenship, which was brought in by the Conservatives in 2014 as part of the controversial Bill C-24.

Mr. McCallum (Markham-Thornhill, Ont.) told The Hill Times that he’s aware of the concerns and will make an announcement in a few weeks. “We’re going to be producing radical changes to the citizenship bill,” Mr. McCallum said. “We’re going to be announcing the details of those changes in just a few weeks.”

Liberal MPs told The Hill Times that although they want new immigrants to acquire proficiency in both or at least one of the two official languages of Canada, it’s also a question of fairness, saying the language requirements disenfranchise new immigrants from their right to take part in the political process...

Monday, February 8, 2016

There are a lot of serious crimes that Toronto police, courts, and prosecutors have to deal with every day. Thousands of sexual offences were reported to police last year in Toronto, which also saw four murders just this past weekend, as gun violence has been mounting in the city since John Tory became its mayor in 2013.

Police investigations and prosecutions cost lots of taxpayer money and eat up resources. So when the Crown Attorney decides to pursue frivolous cases involving minor matters to make a social or political point, for a variety of reasons, the public has a right to demand an explanation.

Perhaps the most glaring of these recent abuses was the trial of Gregory Alan Elliott, in the notorious Twitter trial. Elliott faced a two year legal battle that cost taxpayers a mountain of cash for simply engaging in a twitter fight with a pair of radical feminists. Even the prosecution and police acknowledged that Elliott hadn't threatened or sexually harassed the two women who filed criminal charges against him. In fact, Elliott hadn't even violated twitter's terms of service. The exchanges between Elliott and his accusers show all the parties involved being obnoxious and insulting. But part of the grounds for the Crown's case against Elliott was, quite literally, that he had the temerity to use the same twitter hashtag as two strident feminists who had commenced an online campaign against him. However the feminists in question have a very cozy relationship with some senior Toronto Police officials and with some leftist city councilors and left-wing media figures.

You don't have to be Oliver Wendell Holmes to realize that such a prosecution not only didn't have a reasonable chance of conviction, but it was also idiotic and a political abuse of the justice system. Beyond that, Elliott's prosecution was a trial balloon for a state-sponsored attack on Canadians' free speech rights. That abuse cost Ontario taxpayers figures that may reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.

For different reasons, the trial of Jian Ghomeshi is equally troubling. Sexual assault is a deplorable crime and we have every reason as a society to punish it severely. Like many observers of the circumstances surrounding events leading to the Jian Ghomeshi trial, I find his behavior appalling.

Ghomeshi had been accused of hitting women with whom he was romantically linked and of harassing and abusing staff at the CBC.

When the story broke, Toronto's then-Police Chief, Bill Blair, cast a wide net to find more of Ghomeshi's victims. While there's no such thing as a "perfect victim," the Ghomeshi accusers turned out to be irredeemably flawed in that they kept vital information from police. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they weren't deliberately lying in the witness box, Marie Henein, the defense counsel, proved that they weren't telling the truth about a great deal of their testimony.

Imagine if you went to police and told them someone hit and choked you. There's no documentation or medical evidence to support your allegation because you didn't think there was an injury significant enough that you needed to see a doctor about it. When they ask you when the attack happened, you tell them it took place 11 years ago, and it only just now occurred to you to press charges.

That's exactly the situation in the Ghomeshi case. The only reason the accusers in the Ghomeshi case weren't laughed out of the police station is because in the wake of so much bad publicity, the police and Crown attorney were actively seeking complaints against him. The reason these charges could go forward was that Ghomeshi was kissing the complainants prior to the alleged attacks, which elevated the charge from common assault, which has a statute of limitations, to sexual assault, which has none.

Sex crimes are horrible violations of the person, and often victims are frightened and intimidated by both their attacker and the legal process they have to endure to press charges. We have every reason to facilitate the laying of sexual assault charges involving rapes and sexual abuse. But am I the only one who thinks the charges in Ghomeshi's case are an abuse of the system?

In the months before the trial, twitter hashtags emerged, like #IbelieveLucy, in support of Ghomeshi accuser Lucy DeCoutere.

I believe Lucy too. I believe what she says about what Ghomeshi did, and I believe he's a violent, vile, manipulative creep. But I don't believe her beyond a reasonable doubt to the standard of a criminal conviction. Hopefully, Ghomeshi will pay a penalty in that he will have lost the adulation and star status he so obviously craved. But that happened before the court case, and it's mystifying how the Crown could have decided to take such a weak case to trial.

So far, the only thing the Crown has proved beyond a reasonable doubt is that Ghomeshi is an asshole. But that's not an indictable offense.

In a criminal trial in which there is no physical evidence and the prosecution relies solely on the credibility of witness allegations, the defence has a right to challenge witness credibility and recollection. Indeed, in such a case, there can be very little other defense. Considering the glaring omissions including forgotten love letters and "romantic encounters" subsequent to the violence, the outlandish contradictions, and bizarre inconsistencies in the witnesses' testimonies, the Crown not only doesn't seem to have met the standard of proof necessary for conviction in a criminal case, but it's unlikely they would have won a civil case where just a preponderance of evidence is required. In the Ghomeshi trial, not only did all three complainants initiate contact with him after the alleged assaults, but they lied in court by first claiming under oath that they did not. It's also harder to be convincing that you aren't bringing charges against a famous person as an attention-seeking mechanism when you're actively courting publicists and the media in the wake of those charges. It's going to be next to impossible to convict someone on the basis of such witnesses who have annihilated their own credibility.

Much of the criticism of the trial proceedings come from people upset that the inconsistencies in the testimony, and in particular, the fact that the complainants continued to romantically engage with Ghomeshi after he abused them, is based on a misogynist belief that sexual assault victims "should behave a certain way."

But what's far more troubling than that is that those same critics seem to be advocating the total undermining of the foundation of our judicial system by creating a class of crime where a proper defense cannot be conducted and where a mere accusation can be grounds for criminal conviction. That the Crown would facilitate such a case at public expense is a disgrace.

There are some lessons to be learned from the Ghomeshi trial. Rather than spending time telling society that they need to accept any degree of incomprehensible behaviour from sexual assault victims, perhaps we need to tell sexual assault victims that they need to behave in some measure like rational people.

If a man beats you up, then you should not continue to date him. That doesn't excuse the violence in any way. But it also means that if you're an adult and aggressively pursue a romantic relationship with someone who abuses you, people might reasonably conclude you are an eager, voluntary participant in the abuse.

That may sound harsh. But to the accusers and taxpayers who funded the farce in court the last few days, not nearly so harsh as the Not Guilty verdict the judge is likely to render in the Ghomeshi trial.